HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn

hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp
CourtUnited States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Decided9 September 2019
Citation938 F.3d 985
Case history
Prior action273 F. Supp. 3d 1099 (N.D. Cal. 2017)
Subsequent actionsCert. granted, judgment vacated, 141 S. Ct. 2752, 210 L. Ed. 2d 902 (2021);
Adhered to on remand, 31 F.4th 1180 (9th Cir. 2022)
Court membership
Judges sittingMarsha Berzon, John Clifford Wallace, Terrence Berg

hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., 938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019), was a United States Ninth Circuit case about web scraping. hiQ is a small data analytics company that used automated bots to scrape information from public LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn used legal means to prevent this. hiQ Labs brought a case against LinkedIn in a district court, seeking an injunction against these means, which was granted. LinkedIn appealed. The 9th Circuit affirmed the district court's preliminary injunction, preventing LinkedIn from denying the plaintiff, hiQ Labs, from accessing LinkedIn's publicly available LinkedIn member profiles. However, after further appeal in another court, hiQ was found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms, and there was a settlement.

The 9th Circuit ruled that hiQ had the right to do web scraping.[1][2][3] However, the Supreme Court, based on its Van Buren v. United States decision,[4] vacated the decision and remanded the case for further review in June 2021. In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6] In November 2022 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties.[7]

  1. ^ Crocker, Andrew; Fischer, Camille (September 10, 2019). "Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin Protects Scraping of Public Data". Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  2. ^ Katris, Basileios "Bill"; Schaul, Robert J. (September 30, 2019). "Data Scraping Survives! (At Least for Now) Key Takeaways from 9th Circuit Ruling on the HIQ vs. Linkedin Case". The National Law Review.
  3. ^ Heimes, Rita (September 20, 2019). "Data scraping and the implications of the latest LinkedIn-hiQ court ruling". iapp.org. International Association of Privacy Professionals.
  4. ^ Van Buren v. United States, No. 19-783, 593 U.S. ___, 141 S. Ct. 1648, 210 L. Ed. 2d 26 (2021).
  5. ^ hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn Corp., 31 F.4th 1180 (9th Cir. 2022).
  6. ^ Whittaker, Zack (April 18, 2022). "Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms". TechCrunch.
  7. ^ "hiQ and LinkedIn Reach Proposed Settlement in Landmark Scraping Case". The National Law Review. Retrieved December 22, 2022.